“Guns Are Cheaper At This Tennessee Store If You’re A Christian”: What Better Way To Honor Victims Of A Mass Shooting Than With A Big Gun Sale
Christians who are looking a good deal on a gun need look no further than Frontier Firearms. The Kingston, Tennessee liberty-defending establishment began offering 5 percent discounts last week for anyone who says “I’m a Christian” before purchasing a new handgun.
The rebate was announced shortly after the tragic shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon earlier this month—where the shooter allegedly asked his victims if they were Christians before shooting them.
And what better way to honor victims of a mass shooting than with a a big gun sale?
“If Christians are going to be targeted, we need to protect ourselves,” owner Brant Williams said when the discount began. He, and Frontier Firearms vice president Eric Parish, characterize the mass shooting as religiously motivated, citing reports that shooter Chris Harper Mercer asked students about their faith before killing them.
“I don’t care if you’re a Democrat, or Republican, an Independent, the Green Party, I don’t care what party you’re with. But to say that that shooting right there had nothing to do with religion is ludicrous,” Parish told the Daily Beast. “What if someone had done the same thing and they only shot them if they were Muslim? Would the President react differently?”
Parish alleges the sale, now extended until the end of the month (so hurry!), is no longer reserved for just Christians—or people who say they are Christians— but any and all people willing to declare a religion prior to buying a new weapon.
If a customer said they were Muslim, would there still be a discount. “Of course,” according to Parish, so long as they didn’t also say they were an extremist planning a mass shooting. Obviously.
“Religion was a part of this country’s founding, you know religious freedom. And that’s what it’s about,” Parish said. “Being able to say ‘hey I’m this,’ without getting shot in the back of the head because of it.”
Frontier Firearms has gotten their fair share of colorful commentary from customers who do not appreciate the creative sale. “FUCK YOU, you fucking fear mongering opportunistic scum wads!” wrote one thoughtful potential customer. “You fucking gun idiots make me sick. BTW the Oregon shooter was a Conservative Republican… he was one of you. BTW the bearded fool is he the owner? He looks like a JEWBAG.”
Not exactly the armed, kumbaya Parish was hoping for.
Despite Parish alleging that the store is welcoming any and all faiths, Frontier Firearms’ owner is promoting his own Christian Carry Pins which as the name suggests read: “I am Christian and I carry.” They are $5.00 each which is way less than the 5 percent customers would save on the new guns they buy. Semi-automatic pistols are available at Fronteir Firearms for as low as $408.
“This is America,” Parish said. “And I’m still pretty sure you can pick what your religion is without being persecuted for it.”
By: Gideon Resnick, The Daily Beast, October 13, 2015
“Maine’s GOP Governor Faces Intensifying Scandal”: Paul ‘Rage LePage’ Playing The Role Of A Mobster
Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) is caught up in a scandal that’s likely to get worse before it gets better.
To briefly recap, a Maine charter school hired state House Speaker Mark Eves (D) for a top position, but LePage, a fierce opponent of Democratic legislators, threatened the school – either fire Eves or the governor would cut off the school’s state funding. In effect, LePage played the role of a mobster saying, “It’s a nice school you have there; it’d be a shame if something happened to it.”
The school, left with no options, reluctantly acquiesced. The problem, of course, is that governors are not supposed to use state resources to punish people they don’t like. By most measures, it’s an abuse of power that constitutes an impeachable offense.
Yesterday, the school’s chairman spoke to state investigators who said the governor did precisely what he’s accused of doing. The Bangor Daily News reported:
The chairman of the Good Will-Hinckley board of directors told lawmakers on a government watchdog panel Thursday that Gov. Paul LePage’s threat to withhold state funding because of the school’s hiring of Democratic House Speaker Mark Eves placed the school’s existence in jeopardy. […]
[The] testimony confirmed much of what has been uncovered by the media and the Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability: That by threatening the funding, LePage, his staff and acting Education Commissioner Tom Desjardin were directly responsible for Good Will-Hinckley’s board canceling a $120,000 per year employment contract with Eves.
Soon after, the Portland Press Herald reported that the state’s Government Oversight Committee voted to subpoena two of LePage’s senior aides – his legal counsel and the governor’s senior education adviser – as part of the same investigation.
It’s entirely possible that the end result of the probe will be the Republican’s impeachment – a topic mentioned explicitly in the Press Herald article.
Remember, the Tea Party governor hasn’t actually denied the allegations, and neither have LePage’s allies. The Maine Republican did argue in July, however, that when he threatened the school it was comparable to LePage intervening in a domestic-violence dispute.
“It’s just like one time when I stepped in … when a man was beating his wife,” the governor said. “Should have I stepped in? Legally, No. But I did. And I’m not embarrassed about doing it.”
I still haven’t the foggiest idea what that’s supposed to mean in this context.
For what it’s worth, the bizarre governor’s public support is woefully low, but it has not yet collapsed. The latest statewide poll in Maine, released this morning, shows LePage with a 32% approval rating.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 16, 2015
“Taking On The N.R.A.”: A New, Reinvigorated Gun-Control Movement With Grassroots Support And Backed By Real Money
In the wake of the massacre at Umpqua Community College, in Oregon, Hillary Clinton promised that if she is elected President she will use executive power to make it harder for people to buy guns without background checks. Meanwhile, Ben Carson, one of the Republican Presidential candidates, said, “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.” The two responses could hardly have been more different, but both were testaments to the power of a single organization: the National Rifle Association. Clinton invoked executive action because the N.R.A. has made it unthinkable that a Republican-controlled Congress could pass meaningful gun-control legislation. Carson found it expedient to make his comment because the N.R.A. has shaped the public discourse around guns, in one of the most successful P.R. (or propaganda, depending on your perspective) campaigns of all time.
In many accounts, the power of the N.R.A. comes down to money. The organization has an annual operating budget of some quarter of a billion dollars, and between 2000 and 2010 it spent fifteen times as much on campaign contributions as gun-control advocates did. But money is less crucial than you’d think. The N.R.A.’s annual lobbying budget is around three million dollars, which is about a fifteenth of what, say, the National Association of Realtors spends. The N.R.A.’s biggest asset isn’t cash but the devotion of its members. Adam Winkler, a law professor at U.C.L.A. and the author of the 2011 book “Gunfight,” told me, “N.R.A. members are politically engaged and politically active. They call and write elected officials, they show up to vote, and they vote based on the gun issue.” In one revealing study, people who were in favor of permits for gun owners described themselves as more invested in the issue than gun-rights supporters did. Yet people in the latter group were four times as likely to have donated money and written a politician about the issue.
The N.R.A.’s ability to mobilize is a classic example of what the advertising guru David Ogilvy called the power of one “big idea.” Beginning in the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. relentlessly promoted the view that the right to own a gun is sacrosanct. Playing on fear of rising crime rates and distrust of government, it transformed the terms of the debate. As Ladd Everitt, of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, told me, “Gun-control people were rattling off public-health statistics to make their case, while the N.R.A. was connecting gun rights to core American values like individualism and personal liberty.” The success of this strategy explains things that otherwise look anomalous, such as the refusal to be conciliatory even after killings that you’d think would be P.R. disasters. After the massacre of schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut, the N.R.A.’s C.E.O. sent a series of e-mails to his members warning them that anti-gun forces were going to use it to “ban your guns” and “destroy the Second Amendment.”
The idea that gun rights are perpetually under threat has been a staple of the N.R.A.’s message for the past four decades. Yet, for most of that period, the gun-control movement was disorganized and ineffective. Today, the landscape is changing. “Newtown really marked a major turning point in America’s gun debate,” Winkler said. “We’ve seen a completely new, reinvigorated gun-control movement, one that has much more grassroots support, and that’s now being backed by real money.” Michael Bloomberg’s Super PAC, Independence USA, has spent millions backing gun-control candidates, and he’s pledged fifty million dollars to the cause. Campaigners have become more effective in pushing for gun-control measures, particularly at the local and state level: in Washington State last year, a referendum to expand background checks got almost sixty per cent of the vote. There are even signs that the N.R.A.’s ability to make or break politicians could be waning; senators it has given F ratings have been reëlected in purple states. Indeed, Hillary Clinton’s embrace of gun control is telling: previously, Democratic Presidential candidates tended to shy away from the issue.
These shifts, plus the fact that demographics are not in the N.R.A.’s favor (Latino and urban voters mostly support gun control), might make it seem that the N.R.A.’s dominance is ebbing. But, if so, that has yet to show up in the numbers. A Pew survey last December found that a majority of Americans thought protecting gun rights was more important than gun control. Fifteen years before, the same poll found that sixty-six per cent of Americans thought that gun control mattered more. And last year, despite all the new money and the grassroots campaigns, states passed more laws expanding gun rights than restricting them.
What is true is that the N.R.A. at last has worthy opponents. The gun-control movement is far more pragmatic than it once was. When the N.R.A. took up the banner of gun rights, in the seventies, gun-control advocates were openly prohibitionist. (The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence was originally called the National Coalition to Ban Handguns.) Today, they’re respectful of gun owners and focussed on screening and background checks. That’s a sensible strategy. It’s also an accommodation to the political reality that the N.R.A. created.
By: James Surowiecki, The New Yorker, October 19, 2015 Issue
“Do Republicans Think It Will Be Easy To Beat Hillary?”: Continuing To Believe In Circumstances Shaped By Their Own Talking Points
What is the Republican theory of the 2016 election? Is it that the Democrats have developed a durable demographic advantage in national elections and that the GOP must nominate someone who can broaden the party’s reach beyond core constituencies, as Republicans concluded after the 2012 debacle?
Or is it increasingly that such demographic concerns can be tossed to the winds — that Hillary Clinton is such a flawed candidate that Republicans don’t have to worry too much about picking a standard bearer with broad general election appeal?
The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein has a good piece today in which he posits the latter theory. Klein’s overall point is that the two parties are each making wildly different assumptions about next year’s contest — and that this has driven each party further into its own ideological corner, portending an unusually charged and intense general election battle.
Democrats, Klein points out, are betting that the last two presidential elections show that the way to win is to reconstitute the Obama coalition of millennials, nonwhites, and socially liberal college educated whites. The robust liberal consensus on display at the last debate shows that Hillary Clinton is fully embracing this coalition’s priorities. As I’ve also argued, Democrats see no need to believe this will compromise her in a general election, since many of these policies also have majority support.
The Republican theory of the 2016 election, however, is very different. Here’s how Klein describes it:
Republicans, on the other hand, are making a completely different calculation. Looking ahead to the 2016 campaign, they see Hillary Clinton’s numbers steadily tanking under an ethical cloud, as a growing number of Americans say they don’t trust her. Polls have shown Republicans ahead of Clinton even in Pennsylvania, a blue state that has eluded GOP nominees for decades. They’re confident that her weaknesses as a candidate have made the presidency ripe for the picking. Given this sense of optimism, they see no reason to settle.
Instead, as of this writing, half of Republican primary voters polled nationally are supporting candidates who have never held elective office. At the same time, candidates who fit the profile of a traditional Republican nominee (such as Jeb Bush and Ohio Gov. John Kasich) are at about 10 percent — combined….when the dust settles, it’s difficult to see the Republican electorate deciding that to beat Clinton, they need an “electable moderate” in the mold of Bob Dole, John McCain or Mitt Romney.
Klein seems to be talking mainly about what’s driving the thinking of GOP primary voters. This gives rise to a question: Do serious Republican strategists and establishment figures really believe this? Do they think Clinton is suddenly proving so unexpectedly flawed — thanks to the email scandal and Bernie Sanders’ surprisingly robust challenge — that they are now less inclined to worry about the need for a candidate who can help offset the party’s structural and demographic disadvantages?
If so, you’d think recent events would undercut that confidence. After months of being on the defensive over the email story, we’ve now seen an unexpectedly strong debate performance from Clinton. New fundraising numbers show that she enjoys a large advantage over the serious GOP candidates, and that rank-and-file Democrats may be very energized. A series of disastrous moments of candor from Republicans about the Benghazi probe have undermined the credibility of GOP efforts to exploit the email story. While none of these guarantees anything for Clinton, you’d think they’d remind Republicans that politics changes quickly and that placing too many chips on Clinton’s weakness might be misguided.
And yet recent history demonstrates that GOP strategists sometimes do place too much stock in overly confident, ill-thought-through assessments of the weakness of the opposing candidate and what appear to be insurmountable (but actually prove ephemeral or misleading) political circumstances. In 2012, for instance, the Romney campaign convinced itself that there was no way Obama could possibly get reelected amid such difficult economic circumstances: this made it inevitable that Obama would meet the fate that befell Jimmy Carter, when undecided voters shifted against him to hand Ronald Reagan a big victory. (That itself is bad history, but that underscores my point.) The larger Romney campaign calculation was that there was no way swing voters could possibly see Obama as anything but a total, abject failure, since Republicans knew he had been one. But that reading turned out to be seriously flawed.
Meanwhile, the Romney camp also convinced itself that there was no way the 2012 electorate could possibly be as diverse as it had been in 2008, presumably since Obama’s election was probably a fluke driven by the cult of personality that driven nonwhite and young voters into a frenzy that had worn off once they realized who he really was. That also turned out to be wrong. The point is that Republican operatives adopted a strategic view of the opposing candidate and his circumstances that was largely shaped by their own talking points about him and less about a hard-headed and nuanced look at deeper factors.
Hillary Clinton will of course not be as strong a candidate as Obama was. She does have serious weaknesses. History tilts against one party winning the White House three times in a row. And the question of whether she can mobilize the Obama coalition in Obama-like numbers is a big unknown. But superficial assessments of her current weaknesses — which could be reinforced if Republicans believe their talking points about her — could obscure an appreciation of the built-in advantages that she may enjoy. She could benefit from structural factors such as continued demographic change. The Democratic agenda (this is another possibility that the Romney camp seemed incapable of grasping) may prove more popular than the Republican one with the national electorate, brash assessments that Hillary has lurched “left” notwithstanding. The very real chance at electing the first female president could prove a major factor. And it’s possible — yes, possible — that the Clinton camp may successfully neutralize the email mess after all.
It would be interesting to know just how seriously the smartest GOP operatives are taking these possibilities. Paul Waldman argues today that Republican operatives and establishment figures are not exactly adopting a hard-headed approach to the electability question.
Of course, if Klein is right, and GOP voters are deciding that Clinton is so weak that they need not worry about their standard-bearer’s electability, then it may not matter what Republican strategists and establishment figures think. They aren’t the ones who are picking the GOP nominee.
By: Greg Sargent, The Plum Line Blog, October 16, 2015
“We Have Become A Midterm Party”: RNC Chair; ‘We’re Cooked As A Party’ With 2016 Loss
Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus had hoped for a very different kind of 2016 election cycle. As we discussed a while back, the RNC chief intended to curtail the number of debates, front-load the nominating process, and effectively stack the deck in favor of established, electable candidates. Before the process even began, GOP lawmakers were also supposed to take lessons from the 2012 losses, pass immigration reform, and take steps to broaden the base.
The party, the argument went, would position itself for victory in 2016 by avoiding an embarrassing circus and steering clear of a madcap process that tarnished the party and its candidates alike.
The execution of Priebus’ plan has worked out quite differently, and when he sat down yesterday with the conservative Washington Examiner, he looked ahead to next fall.
…”I think that we have become, unfortunately, a midterm party that doesn’t lose and a presidential party that’s had a really hard time winning,” Priebus said. “We’re seeing more and more that if you don’t hold the White House, it’s very difficult to govern in this country – especially in Washington D.C.”
“So I think that – I do think that we’re cooked as a party for quite a while as a party if we don’t win in 2016. So I do think that it’s going to be hard to dig out of something like that,” Priebus told the Examiner.
It’s a fair assessment. Looking back over the last six presidential elections, Democrats have won the popular vote five times. If Dems expand that to a six-out-of-seven advantage, it will be that much more difficult for Republicans to characterize themselves as a national governing party.
What’s less clear is the practical implication of defeat. When Priebus imagines the Republican Party as “cooked … for quite a while,” I’m not entirely sure what he means in applied terms. Does the RNC chair think another defeat would be an impetus for dramatic intra-party change? Does he envision a splintering of the party in which right-wing members break off?
In the same interview, Priebus added that he doesn’t “anticipate” another rough cycle next year. “I think … history is on our side,” he told the Examiner.
As a factual matter, he’s entirely correct. Looking back over the post-WWII era, parties have nearly always struggled to hold onto the White House for three straight elections. Democrats do, in fact, go into 2016 facing historical headwinds.
But it’s nevertheless easy to imagine Dems prevailing anyway, leaving Republicans “cooked.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 16, 2015
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